SINSON IS JON KENT
Not metaphorically. Not philosophically. Canonically. Solicits dropped last week, and to my dismay, the description of Sinister Sons #6 mentioned no addition of a third kid joining the story as I had surmised previously. It took me a bit to figure out what it meant, but we got there. I have been convinced since March 2022 that DC was eventually going to pull the old switcheroo and reinstate the better™️ Jon Kent into the main canon after Tomasi's Superman & Robin Special gave us a really strange and kinda stilted adventure of Jon and Damian in the Fortress of Solitude. That book took me two months to figure out what it was saying: two versions of Jon Kent were coming. I didn't know when. I didn't know how, but I knew this promise would be upheld.
1. Vibe Check
Ever since Bendis was on the outs in 2020, DC has hinted very un-subtlely that everything he and Dan DiDio had planned was going out of the window from Drake to 5G. Super Sons megafans might remember that one time Bendis tweeted that your favorite comics were ass and the upcoming Legion book was the second coming of Christ. They might also remember that Challenge of the Super Sons opens with an inside joke mocking that very same tweet.
But Tomasi wasn't alone. Bendis himself would bemoan the future in his Justice League run, implying that nothing he had planned would come to pass.
The wheels of change were turning even back in 2020/2022. I was so confident in this that I wrote a gigantic essay (that I won an award for) before Dark Crisis had released, and I listed all of this out and much more before. At the time, I was convinced that we'd have two Jons by the time Dark Crisis ended. Alas, it's two years later, and no such luck. I still stand by the premise of that essay; that Superman: Son of Kal-El was an apology to readers for mistreating a fan-favorite character. I was incorrect in my assumption that the teenager Jon Kent we'd been told was the same one that had left Earth with Jor-El in Bendis's Man of Steel mini was actually the New 52 Superboy or his original, Jonathan Lane Kent. Although we have yet to be told his full name since Bendis essentially became the DC Comics showrunner, we are still supposed to assume our newest Superman is Jonathan Samuel Kent, but I know better. He's not the Jon born during Convergence. Son of Kal-El showed us he was born in the Fortress of Solitude like they showed off in Superman Reborn, not the Flashpoint Batcave. It's important to distinguish that these two are different and distinct characters. Really, the fact that Zod's son Lor hasn't found himself aged to match the newest Superman gives me suspicion enough that something is up.
2. "Last we left off..." - Matthew Mercer
Since I published my essay, Jon has been busy. He got his dad back. He announced he was going steady with his boyfriend to the entire world. He got his secret identity back. He went to another Earth to fight his tormentor of five years. Everything's coming up Milhouse for Jon.
And I'm bored.
Jon hasn't done anything self-motivated for what seems like years. No, it literally has been years. His boyfriend came to him and instigated their relationship. He didn't do anything to get Clark back. He didn't do anything to resolve anything with Ultraman. He left the man who brought him to that Earth in the Phantom Zone and was cross-faded back to his own after waggling his finger disapprovingly at the Injustice version of Clark. His scrappy impishness has left. His devil-may-care attitude towards his own safety is gone. Thankfully, Dan Jurgens and Lee Weeks made a sequel series to their mini that introduced Jon in the back-ups of Action Comics.
Lois & Clark: Doom Rising is in many ways Jurgens and Weeks' response to Brian Bendis' Superman stories. Set some time before the Kents moved back to Metropolis and well before his fateful encounter with Jor-El, Jon is approached by a mysterious space person who asks him to join them as they go into the cosmos to right wrongs, but instead of sitting idly as it became clear his life was in danger, Jon attempts an escape. Clark is kept occupied by a big bruiser so he can't come to Jon's rescue, but with Lois' help (incontrast to the complacency Bendis wrote for her) Clark eventually takes chase to rescue their boy. I got a lot of joy from that story. It also gave me another reason to believe my theory was still valid. After crash landing, Jon rescues his fellow survivor from the fiery wreckage but is severely burned in the process. I ask you: How can a boy who spent five entire years in a volcano prison leave unscathed if mere fire messed up his arms? (I'd also like to ask Bendis how his power of flight was sapped immediately under the volcanic ash plume but remained invulnerable for all five years, but I digress.)
The mini also ends on a line fit for canned laughter to follow as Jon says, "Awesome! Maybe I should get kidnapped more often!" in response to getting bacon and pancakes for breakfast as he returns home. They knew what they were doing. I admit that on its own, these things may not be indicative of anything. It may be the whims of Jon's creators to let off some steam and DC's corporate offices obliging, knowing there is an audience for the younger Jon Kent. Or that's what I would have said if the other story DC published starring the older Jon Kent didn't have a few nuggets of its own.
Tom Taylor wrote Adventures of Superman Jon Kent as a kind of epilogue to Superman Son of Kal-El to mixed reception to put it lightly. I'm not here to talk about the climax of the final issue as tempting, as that may be. Instead, I want to focus on the beginning when Jon is in the company of Val-Zod, the Superman of Earth-2. Jon states that he knows that Val is from another Earth because he can see the differences in his molecular structure. I believe this is a useful tidbit for later when Jon needs to identify his double is not from a different Earth than his. Then when they get to the Earth they've tracked Ultraman in response to Jon asking why they needed him specifically and not any other Jon in the multiverse, Val says that time is a constant across the multiverse which calls into question how Jon was thrown backward in time to an Earth-3 with a Crime Syndicate that the audience had seen die. Then, as if to disperse any lingering theory that Jon may be the son of Ultraman and not a true son of Clark Kent, Tom has Jon say, "I was never your Jon!" Finally, near the end of issue 5, Jon says he's been practicing sneaking up on Damian for years (plural) while holding the Lasso of Truth when he should only have had a single year between meeting Damian and getting lost in the vastness of space. Another potential plot hole if this were the same Jon that we knew before, which I hope to have convinced you at this point that he's not.
3. Pavlov's Orphan
And now to substantiate my Sinson claim. I suppose all of my previous theories have been fueled by vibes, but this more than the others feels that way, yet it feels the most salient. So, who is Sinson? He thinks he's the abandoned son of Thaal Sinestro left on some rock out in space. That's probably not true, just based on how much we've dwelled on how much Sinson wants it to be the case, but also because Sinestro already had a secret child that he hid out in space. Soranik Natu was created by Geoff Johns during his time on Green Lantern, but her big backstory reveal was handled by Peter Tomasi, notably one of the creators of Rebirth's Super Sons and writer for Sinister Sons. I find it very unlikely that he would purposely reuse a plot point he had already visited for another child of the same character. What's more, Sinister Sons has taken inspiration from the classic Charles Dickens novel Oliver Twist. Sinson is in an orphan situation like when Oliver gets to London. He's encouraged to steal to line the pockets of the adult giving him food and shelter. This guy is called Nagaf, which is Fagin backward if you change a letter to avoid being dangerously close to a slur. Oliver Twist ends with Oliver going to live with a living relative he didn't know he had, another reason that Sinson likely isn't Sinestro's kid.
Nearly unprompted, Nagaf tells the boy that he was left at his orphanage six years ago by a woman who said she'd be back without leaving a name to call him by. "Oh, shoot. I guess that means he can't be Jon," is what an IDIOT would say! Two things: nothing is saying that that planet makes its full revolution around its star at the same rate as Earth does and in a metanarrative sense, six years ago irl from 2024 is 2018 which is the year that Bendis was Coming. Between Son of Kal-El, Lois & Clark 2, Superman & Robin Special, and Challenge of the Super Sons, all of those writers have more than happy to reply in kind to Bendis' multiple in-comic responses to fan discontent for his work. This would be Tomasi's third time and rightly justified since Bendis' infamous tweet directly insulted his work, and Tomasi clearly wasn't too happy about the decisions made when he was removed from Superman.
One of the more blatant times Tomasi would voice his dismay was later in Challenge of the Super Sons when Jon makes a comment that he didn't "instantly forget" some mental torture he went through in a subtle jab at the writing of the current Superman Jon Kent's ability to compartmentalize his own trauma. Really, this pair of panels may have held more foreshadowing than I initially caught.
So then why does Sinson look like he is from Korugar? My guess is he suffered some burns escaping from his volcano prison. Jurgens left us that little nugget last year, and his Jon certainly wouldn't have just sat in that crater for five years before trying to escape. Why doesn't he have the powers of a Kryptonian? When Lor-Zod gets to the planet Sinson lives, his Kryptonian powers disappear quickly. Why doesn't he seem to remember anything about who he is and where he comes from then? Why does he think his father is a villain? I'll say amnesia and mixing his time with Ultraman with Nagaf telling him he was from Korugar, but Sinson has more pathos hidden deep in his subconscious that betrays his true self.
Sinson chooses this name for himself which could be a really on-the-nose descriptor of his truth that he is Sinestro's son or it could be Jon's impetus for leaving with Jor-El coming out, that there is something wrong with him and that's why the Teen Titans rejected him. To this point, throughout the backups in Green Lantern where he was introduced, Sinson has soliloquies revealing that he begs to be taken seriously by his peers. When he overthrows Nagaf, he quickly builds a Sinestro Corps from his fellow orphans and paints big ol' "S" shapes on all of their chests (and shoulders like the current Superman family's jackets). He is good with technology enough to build a taser and a rocket, which again Jon is also known for. The opening scene even parallels Superman #8 with the boys using that sci-fi engineer zappy stick to make or fix something. He's able to futz with Lor-Zod's Kryptonian space pod very easily which presumably would not be easy for a boy who is unfamiliar with that flavor of technology. He has an affinity with dogs which Jon is known to have. He's cocky and fallible like Jon. He's got long hair like Jon, though much longer than the last time a story was published about him. All of the issue covers give him glasses that he doesn't wear in the story proper as if they're trying to imply that this is a secret identity i.e. Clark Kent. Sinson and Sinestro are not drawn with the same shaped ears in the mini, either. What I think is most significant, though, is that throughout the backups, Sinson acts more similar to Batman than to Sinestro. He's not going around causing fear to assert his dominance over the seedy underbelly he's robbing. He's righting wrongs. He's stealing drug money to skim creds off the top for his rocket, sure, but he's also returning organs to the hospital they were stolen from. This is the work of a kid who wants to do good, but his words do not match his actions. It's going to take a journey inside a giant TIME-TRAVELING SPACE WHALE (wink wink nudge nudge) to sort it all out. The cover and solicit for the sixth issue promise as much.
I didn't even have time to mention this time the chalkboard in Flashpoint Beyond that Jeremy Adams worked on promised that a supposed "he" would find "his son" and that the Time Masters were warned not to interfere, or that the recent Flash issue 797 implied that the Super Sons cameoing in the issue were from the main universe and had just finished their battle with Rex Luthor in Adventures of the Super Sons and how important that mini is to the continuity of this theory. I also could have brought up that every Tom King miniseries since Batman/Catwoman has led to an element he wrote end up in the main canon of the DCU, and that he's currently writing Super Sons in the backup feature of his Wonder Woman run. Everything is coming back around, and I feel confident we'll see its fruition come June or July.
